You end up with a sincere belief that greedy corporations, Republicans, the Tea Party, and the rest of the reactionary reprobates who oppose Obama’s policies must be isolated from society and crushed for the common good. This mental plunge has plenty of repulsive examples. Observe this quote from a recent tax cut debate on Twitter: “Nazi fascist conservative cockroaches like you will be extinct — the sooner the better … You’re fat too.”

Building up and maintaining an illusion of such a magnitude requires participation of the media, education, and entertainment industries in a coordinated, long-term propaganda campaign.

Once the illusion reaches a critical mass, those afflicted by it become immune to facts, numbers, or rational arguments. Confronting them with logic will only cause more resentment, name-calling, and sometimes violence.

New technologies and the rise of digital social networking and communication have opened up new opportunities to play the game on an even broader scale.

From the start, the Obama campaign was able to deploy new media in ways that make Obama’s six million fake followers on Twitter seem like small change. It paid software developers to create a sophisticated system of data mining that allowed them to manipulate voters’ individual pet issues, and to run daily computer simulations in response to slipping polls so as to boost turnout where it most mattered.

But Obama’s tech-savvy aura is also a prop for yet another illusion: it leads you to believe that it envelopes some advanced, futuristic, 21st century content, while it’s only a shell full of rattling old clichés dating to the first half of the 20th century. In that sense, Obama is like a car salesman peddling a sleek 2012 Alfa Romeo that runs on a Soviet-made 23hp engine from a 1961 Zaporozhets.

Obama’s “tax cuts for the middle class” game reached Twitter in the form of a #My2K hashtag, with the president asking his followers to imagine what they could get with an extra $2,000, and then to tweet Congress to make sure they get what they want. A few days later, Obama upped the ante with an announcement that he would personally “take Twitter questions” using the same hashtag.

Since we have a Twitter account, we also posted some questions to the president:

If My2K is mine, to whom does the rest belong?

What exactly is the “middle class”?

If My2K is so good, why not make it My4K?

Can I get My2K in gallons of gasoline now before the check loses 30% of its value by April?

Since the dollar will soon be worthless, should I convert My2K to rubles?

You once said that focusing on making a buck shows poverty of ambition. How is focusing on My2K different?

How much of my other taxes will go toward Sandra Flukes’ $3K/year government-subsidized condoms?

25 Comments, 15 Threads

1.
tanstaafl

…it’s (socialism’s) also about manipulating you into praising the thieves as your saviors.

All this taxation was completely unthinkable at this nation’s founding. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that even the idea of taxing personal income was brought into being by the 16th amendment.

And so it began or at least got a big shot in the ass, the federal government’s growing sense of entitlement to intrude upon and infest the lives of individual citizens. The Road to Socialism. The Road to Serfdom.

Obama has amply demonstrated he cares jack sh!t about fiscal responsibility, even though he yakked about the importance of same (“need to fix entitlements, need to cut the deficit in half”) while trying to get himself selected in 2008.

“Taxes on the rich” is a pure D class warfare play, will accomplish nothing in righting democrats’ egregious spending on behalf of cronies, unions and government employees. (101 new govt. hires per day since Obama took office)

Con artists thrive on the skill of putting an idea into your head and making you think of it as your own.

“Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe.”

So, as they used to say during reconstruction, “what’s a poor taxpayer to do?” Turn it back on them! We shouldn’t be whining about the “47%” that pays little or no federal income tax. That’s too low a percentage. We should be demanding, for “fairness” sake, that the “47%” be INCREASED to “99%”! Fairness demands that we put some real meaning to the claim: “we are the 99%”. RIGHT?!?!?
Don’t get me wrong, tanstaafl, I’m not suggesting that we all earn incomes below the poverty line. I’m suggesting that the very concept of taxing above the poverty line is what’s wrong. That line should be MUCH HIGHER! How high? Since the Democrats agree, in lockstep, that the line between “the rich” and “the middle class” is $250k, and they’re always telling us how they are all about “protecting” the “middle class, then they should prove it. Instead of fighting a losing battle to merely “extend” the Bush tax rates, Republicans should propose a tax reform bill that not only lets the rates expire for the top incomes, but that also exempts THE FIRST $250K FROM THE INCOME TAX ALTOGETHER!

If we, as individuals, can no longer imagine living without a federal income tax, then perhaps we can at least imagine a federal income tax we can live with.

Good one. Boehner is a congressional cat herder, with that skill set, and he is a nice guy, but he does not have the skill to cut through the Left’s narrative, pushing their points to absurdity. #My2K? #My4K? I want #AllMyK back! I promise to spend it all and save NOTHING! My dollars will go on a magical multiplier tour through the economy…

The American people have voted in this bunch of Alinskyite class warriors, so why shouldn’t Republicans try to play the game better than they do?
If Democrats can buy votes by taxing the rich and promising free government handouts for the poor, then it should be just as easy for Republicans to buy votes with no taxes and free government for the “middle class”. What’s “fair” for the middle class goose is certainly “fair” for the ruling class gander, and it really doesn’t matter if the math works, because the math isn’t working now anyway.

If opponents to the plan whine about lost tax revenues under such a scheme, our narrative would counter that government “spending” for a whole list of tax deductions would very nearly disappear overnight, producing a “net gain” in revenues. The federal government would only have to “spend” on exemptions and deductions for barely 2% of the population; for the remaining 98%, government would “spend” nothing. In just one example, the federal government would “save” thirty-seven hundred dollars for each of the more than 300 million individual exemptions it “spends” for now, because barely two percent of the citizenry would file taxes and claim them. Why, that’s more than ELEVENTY $TRILLION dollars “saved” right there! Why, then our lords and masters in Washington could take all that money it didn’t “spend” on exemptions for individuals and “invest it” in paying off the national debt each year, instead of having to borrow it from China.

I think it would be safe to say that if the first $250,000 earned by each individual were exempt from the income tax, the United States could be totally in the black in under three years. (snicker)

“It wasn’t until the early 20th century that even the idea of taxing personal income was brought into being by the 16th amendment.”

In 1862 an income tax was established by Congress. The same act also established the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. This tax remained in effect for years, to pay for the Civil War. It also taxed inheritances and pensions. The income tax netted more than $310 million in 1866. It was repealed in 1872.

Congress enacted another income tax in 1895 but it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1896.

The income tax made possible by the Sixteenth Amendment is at least the third incarnation of a federal income tax.

Just trying to point out how far we’ve come (or gone) and how we got here.

The 16th amendment entrenched the notion that a federal government was entitled to tax private income, not as a temporary measure, not as a stopgap, but as a whole new and permanent relationship between the individual and his government.

So many powers have been usurped by all three branches of government, powers that far and above exceed anything remotely resembling their Constitutional mandates.

The idea that a Congress with highly circumscribed Constitutional powers could even tax personal income (and then spend it on personal pork projects) would have been inconceivable to thinkers like Jefferson & Madison.

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

~James Madison

And now we have a president who isn’t afraid to say he finds the legislative branch a bother and prefers to rule by executive order.

And socialist/Marxists/communists do what they do best, but one has to be willing to peer inside their looking glass to internalize what is at stake. And if Americans prefer to view the Feds as their saviors, then it is a more than a herculean job to disabuse them of their fantasy.

The short and long of the ‘fiscal cliff’ is nothing short of nonsense, at least until true Conservatives cease playing Obama and his gang’s game. But having weepy eyed, alcoholic Boehner at the helm renders it a sucker’s game to boot.

One way or another government will soon cost everybody in America more money. It is call raising taxes. You can call it anything you want, but it is still in some form a tax increase. Only in America can you raise taxes virtually across the board and talk about tax cuts.

Over the years, heck, over the decades, we have heard about government waste. $400 toilets. $900 hammers. Now unless we are buying a billion toilets and a billion hammers…. big deal. What about those literally trillions of dollars that have just gone missing over the decades? Yes, I am including DoD in that waste.

Morally, it is indefensible to even talk about raising taxes on anybody until it is determined where all those missing dollars went. Who has them? What were they originally budgets for and why weren’t they used for that purpose or properly tracked and accounted for? Has anybody tried to recover those missing dollars? Has anybody gone to prison?

If we can budget for a few hundred billion here and there and then it just goes missing… we don’t need *them* asking for more money to waste and go missing. Just use what you have and keep track of it better.

Sorry if it seems I was picking on DoD. You are right about those others. My specific mention of DoD waste goes to national security issues. People should be going to prison in droves if that kind of money is missing from DoD, and not just for financial fraud.

Other than the incessant lying, the thing I’ve realized that is so infuriating about these people is that for them, it is all about the manipulation. I don’t think they really have an ideology in the sense that liberalism or conservatism have been ideologoies. For them, it’s only about power, and as long as they are extending their control by maniputlating, tricking, conning, and deceiving other people, they are happy. Even marxism is only the con game du jour, just the shell game that they are playing today because it makes it so easy to pit the serfs agains the enemy of the day, and ultimately against themselves.

Anybody who thinks that the tax cuts, aka tax hikes, are going to harm any of the manipulators in any way is crazy. Whatever happens, and it doesn’t matter what “whatever” is, is going to benefit themselves and their allies, and only them.

Don’t you understand?“Unemployment benefits are creating jobs faster than practically any other program”; NANCY PELOSI.
Therefore, social security must be running a close second.
Followed by welfare, housing assistance, and free school lunches.
When are they going to start the free lunch program for us starving college students?

It’s very difficult to gain a good understanding of socialism from the classroom. I think the profs in the US have a vested interest in not describing it accurately. This post is a nice addition to fix the misunderstandings. I recommend Kenneth Minogue’s work as well as Jean-Francois Revel. Between LSE and Paris they know what Marxism looks like.

“You must agree that “you didn’t build that.” There must be a popular consensus that the crumbs you are getting back from the government are a sign of caring and largesse, not a meager fraction of your potential earnings.”

Or we go Galt.

Take the bennies… SNAP and work for REAL pay in the Freedom(or Black Market) …. hey we are all Greeks now.

Shum taka ta ta taka shum.

Who needs the fed? Freedom is a state of mind, and the will to act upon it.

“Obama is like a car salesman peddling a sleek 2012 Alfa Romeo that runs on a Soviet-made 23hp engine from a 1961 Zaporozhets.”
Actuaaly, what Obama is lies in his past: remember, he was the Chom King, a Zen master and he ruled over those getting high. He himself could control it an d not get addicted…. but the people he sold to or used with , many could not. And they looked up to him. And he loved the power to control people by giving them their aphrodisiac. THAT is what he is about.

Kiss the middle class tax cuts goodbye, that’s where the money is. It is possible, just possible, that the Chief Freak may retain the lower rates, on the notion that it will increase the deficts even more then now, doing more harm faster. Whatever is worse works for him and the left.

Why sit down at the table? If you’re going to lose anyway why play? The legislative equivalent to vote
present on ANY spending and tax bills would be the same as registering a protest without being held
responsible for the aftermath. Let him and them have at the ownership of the foreseeable disaster.

Let’s have ZERO income. Everyone stay home and screw off. Stop paying the bills. Go raid the local food store.. fill the tub with water and wait for the end… no wait, the end is here now.

This just in, the killer’s father is a suspect in a Harry Reid scheme to bilk millions of dollars from Las Vegas visitors.. and the boy went nuts.. oh wait,.. never mind, that was another story. and now we hear that there are 430 dead at the church where the conservative man with the assault machine gun.. wait.. what’s that? Oh, that was a movie? Ok, never mind.. So here comes some latest news just in off the wire.. Representative Boner now suggests a tax hike for the poor, all social security payments will be diverted to the whitehouse for new staffing.. at 10 billion per year that should easily be collected from the bottom 20% of Americans.. wait now.. what’s that?? It’s spelled Boener? sounds the same to me.. and what? Oh it’s the top 20%, not the bottom.. OK whatever.. We here in the news media try to get you the latest crap hot out of the cow’s rear end as fast as possible.. And now we have a new report of an autistic mother burning down a Walmart because her coupons were rejected at the checkout register… more on that in a couple of minutes…